Suzhou people's "back garden": Why has the art garden become the representative of the "elegance" of the garden?

Wen | tough fog

In the garden, there are reading books, there are barns, there are paintings, and there are opera stages for listening to music, covering all aspects of the cultural life of the literati. The people and things living in the garden, the literary style and the wind flow, are the invisible hands that shape the temperament of a garden. When it comes to the elegance of the garden, I have to mention the art garden. It is a quiet one in the World Heritage Garden, a small alley full of tourist buses that cannot enter the park, and Suzhou people regard it as a private back garden. Tea room Yanguang Pavilion taken from Ruan's "nourishing life extension, and natural light", is the largest existing water pavilion in the Suzhou garden, but also the favorite of the old Suzhou, a pot of longjing can be soaked in the morning; the pavilion has an excellent line of sight, looking out at a pool of clear water.

Built during the Ming Dynasty, the garden was originally said to be three times larger than it is today. What made Yipu famous was its second owner, Wen Zhenmeng, who was still called Yaopu at the time. The Wen family is a family of scholars, Wen Zhenmeng's great-grandfather is the great painter Wen Zhengming, and his grandfather Wen Peng and father Wen Yuanfa are also calligraphers and painters. Wen Zhenmeng wrote a book "Gu Su Mingxian Xiaoji" when he was idle in the medicine garden, hooking the past of Shen Xiangxian, and they were all sage celebrities with many worldly friends. Wen Zhenmeng went to the exam ten times, and finally at the age of fifty, he was admitted to the Middle Grade, and the official was a scholar of Dongge University, but soon he was impeached by Wei Zhongxian for shangshu and demoted to the second level, and he was deeply disappointed and did not go to his post, and returned to Suzhou to idle. In the sixth year of the Apocalypse (1626), Wen Zhenmeng was again implicated and stripped of his official position. The younger brother Wen Zhenheng returned from Nanjing to his hometown in Suzhou to accompany his brother.

The art garden passes through the brick carved gatehouse at the end of the alleyway behind the foyer

Wen Zhenheng is also a strange person, giving up the imperial examination, only concentrating on all elegant things, especially the study of gardening. His monograph "Chronicles of Long Things" is jokingly called "Garden Decoration Guide" by modern people, from twelve aspects such as rooms, flowers and trees, water stones, poultry and fish, calligraphy and painting, several beds, utensils, locations, etc., talking about how to elegantly arrange a garden, which has become a certain benchmark for studying the life of the literati in the Ming Dynasty. Nowadays, many people describe the late Ming Dynasty as "flashy and desolate", material life flourishing, and literati and elegant things are omniscient, but they are always shrouded in the atmosphere of the crisis of the end. In this context, the title of the book is taken from the allusion of Wang Gong of the Jin Dynasty that "there is no long thing in ordinary life", which is superfluous, but it is actually an anti-language, saying exactly what the author seems to be the most important thing.

Wen Zhenheng begins by saying of the garden: "Those who live in the landscape are the first, and the village is secondary... And the mixed city, it is necessary to have a clean door, a clean room, a pavilion with a nostalgia for the world, and a ghostly style in the pavilion. "He commented on every aspect of the residence according to his own preferences, and set the norms. For example, talk about the pair, take the Tang poetic mood at will; the material style of the door knocker: only copper or fine iron, yellow and white copper are tacky, it is best to be a butterfly with green and rust spots, engraved with a chicken pattern; if the gate is painted, it is suitable for Zhu, purple, and black, and the others are not OK; the high pavilion is the most vulgar; the Linshui Pavilion, which can use blue silk as a curtain to cover the sun, purple silk as an account to cover the wind and snow, the most taboo to use fabric, otherwise what is the difference between the high pavilion and the tavern pharmacy... The aesthetic of spiritual purity, the effort to maintain useless beauty, and the fragile beauty of elegy.